Has the FBI Found DB Cooper After 40 Years?

The DB Cooper case began as one of the strangest airplane hijackings in the first age of hijackings that started in the late 1960s. Generally hijackers of that time were political extremists or lone nuts. But DB Cooper did it for money.

Now the FBI has found some new evidence, after four decades of searching, of a suspect who is in some way connected to the hijacking. Apparently fingerprints on an item belonging to the suspect, now deceased, was matched to some fingerprints belonging to Cooper on the hijacked airliner.

On Nov. 24, 1971, in the middle of the afternoon, a man identifying himself as Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 from Portland, Ore., to Seattle. Midway through the flight, he whispered to a flight attendant that he had a bomb in his briefcase, along with a note to the same message. His demands were $200,000 in small, unmarked $20 bills along with two back and two front parachutes. He also wanted a fuel truck ready at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

His demands were complied with. The plane was refueled at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. In return for the money and the parachutes, Cooper released the passengers. The plane took off again with the flight crew at 7:40 p.m. At 8 p.m., the aircraft's aft door was opened and about 13 minutes later it is surmised Cooper departed from the plane.

Subsequent investigation into the Cooper hijacking have proven somewhat fruitless. A placard containing instructions for lowering the aft door of a Boeing 727 and three packets of the ransom money have been recovered. But despite decades of leads, it appears Cooper and the rest of the money have vanished. None of the rest of the ransom money has been found to have been circulated or spent, despite the fact the serial numbers on the bills are readily available for search.

Cooper was an air pirate and a kidnapper who endangered the lives of dozens of passengers and flight crew members. However, in some peoples' minds he has assumed a kind of cult status as a daring bandit who had gotten away with his crime. Whether his remains are rotting somewhere in the forests of the Pacific Northwest or whether he is enjoying life on the run somewhere, his crime was one of the more colorful in history.